I saw An Inconvenient Truth.

It was boring.

I might have even fallen asleep during a portion of it. But that’s not really surprising because I saw it late at night downtown at Cinemapolis, and well, who could really be enthused about watching a slideshow on a Friday or Saturday night? It was sort of like going to class.

Which is the reason why, I assume, earlier this year the Environment Minister of the United Kingdom decided to send a copy of the film to every secondary school in the U.K., with the idea being every 11 through 14-year-old ought to see the movie as part of an educational program about climate change. The British government probably assumed that students would never see the film without viewing it at school or would likely not get out of it what I clearly didn’t get out of it during my trip to the movie theater.

The difference is that I really didn’t need Al Gore to tell me about global warming to believe that it exists. It was 90 degrees here in the days leading up to fall break. That’s evidence enough for me that something strange is going on with the environment. Secondary school students, however, may need to be directly confronted with these issues in order for them to take the discussion seriously.

But I digress …

The purpose of this column is to bring to light a news story that you might have missed in all the brouhaha surrounding Gore’s recent Nobel Prize win and the obligatory “will he run for president?” conversation. (Side note: I think a Gore-Obama ticket would be fun, but that’s just me.)

Last Wednesday, British High Court Judge Michael Burton approved the decision to show the film to students in school (after an angry parent challenged it), but said that “written guidance to teachers designed to ensure Gore’s views are not presented uncritically must accompany the showings,” according to the Associated Press.

While Burton said that he believed the movie was “substantially founded upon scientific research and fact,” he felt that the science was used “in the hands of a talented politician and communicator, to make a political statement and to support a political program.”

Now, I’ll admit that I don’t know much about free speech laws in the U.K. And, I’ll even admit that giving notes to teachers about how to teach a movie or book that had a clear political inclination would probably be a good idea (a movie about abortion, for instance). But I am hard pressed to see how An Inconvenient Truth is a political movie.

Does the left tend to care more about global warming and environmental issues? Yes. Is Gore a Democrat? Yes. But seriously, shouldn’t we all, regardless of our political viewpoint, care about the future of our planet? Shouldn’t all students (and more broadly, all citizens) be able to hear all viewpoints without it being censored (or, more accurately: framed) by the government? (Not to mention the fact that Gore isn’t even a British politician.)

But you know what? That really isn’t even the problem here.

If the U.K. wants to frame An Inconvenient Truth when it is shown in schools, I don’t have much of an issue with that. It’s their prerogative to limit what their students can and cannot think (although I think that prerogative is seriously misguided).

What I have a problem with is that the person who made this decision is not a scientist. Not an Education Minister. Not a teacher.

It was a judge.

A judge who said that the movie contains exactly nine inaccuracies.

How can he possibly know this? Did he seriously go through every one of Gore’s assertions and fact check them? I doubt it.

A Wales teacher’s union official quoted in Western Mail, a Welsh newspaper, has it right: “I don’t think it’s appropriate for a judge to say what should be taught in schools and how. The only body that could do that would be the General Teaching Council for Wales.” This way, at least a group of educators would be able to assess the movie for its educational value.

Burton’s ruling said that the notes to go along with the movie must tell teachers that several of the opinions espoused by Gore in the movie are not the opinions of the government and, specifically, that there is “a view to the contrary.”

Well, Judge Burton, does that mean that British teachers need extra notes to go along with Schindler’s List or any other movie about World War II because Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn’t think the Holocaust occurred? That’s “a view to the contrary,” no?

There are obvious parallels to be made here to the evolution debate in the United States, which has been litigated in the court system. The one major difference, however, is that at least on some level, the debate over the teaching of creationism, intelligent design and evolution is a First Amendment separation of church and state issue — a legal issue.

To me, Judge Burton’s opinion is similar to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s remark in Jacobellis v. Ohio that he didn’t know how to describe what “hard-core pornography” was, but that he “know[s] it when [he] see[s] it.” However, Justice Stewart joined in a dissent years later in Miller v. California that essentially said that the “I know it when I see it” test was unworkable. It seems he realized that there are some decisions that judges shouldn’t necessarily make based on their own personal opinions.

Judge Burton might think that An Inconvenient Truth is a political movie that ought to be framed in a particular way, but he seems to have forgotten that his job as a judge is not to be an expert on climate change, but to enforce the law. I’m pretty sure that regardless of what one thinks about so-called “activist judges” in this country, we can all agree that a judge should not be injecting his or her opinion into the classroom unless there is a legal issue at stake.

While I’m no expert on British law, I should hope that this value transcends the Atlantic Ocean.

Eric Finkelstein ’06 is a former Sun managing editor and is currently a second-year student in the Law School. He can be contacted at efinkelstein@cornellsun.com. Saturdays Excepted appears alternate Mondays.